Why did Nokia acquire Juniper's RAN Intelligence and team?

You might have seen the headlines, Nokia announced on October 2nd the acquisition of Juniper Networks' RAN Intelligence team.

If you are not fully familiar with the space, here is a little perspective on this announcement and its impact on the market.

Juniper Networks had long looked to expand its footprint in operators networks beyond pure networking. Particularly, the RAN was a domain that was growing and of significant importance as it traditionally consumes up to 80% of the Capital Expenditure of a new telecom generation. It would have been costly and long to start an organic product development in the RAN radio or software (CU / DU) so the company smartly opted to attack a greenfield environment: the Open RAN RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) space.

There are different flavours of RIC and Juniper selected the "easiest" and least controversial to start with, the non real time RIC. The company licensed source code from Turkcel's Netsia subsidiary and started development in 2021. The non RT RIC represents the evolution of Self Organizing Networks (SON), Element Management Systems (EMS) and of traditional Operational Support Systems (OSS). OSS is a market segment that has been dominated by AMDOCS and Netcracker, and represented two great opportunities for new entrants and traditional telco vendors:

1. A 20+ billion $ market segment that is ripe for disruption (entrenched legacy vendors, aging, proprietary technology, emerging cloud native standards and interfaces)
2. An "easy" entry into the (open) RAN market segment, with high control value, without having to develop the expensive, risky and difficult bits (radios and radio software). 

Juniper Networks executed beautifully and even became an early leader in the RAN intelligence ecosystem in 2023. The market looked at this point like it was going to favour independent generalists such as Juniper and VMWare for early commercial launches, but HPE announced its acquisition of Juniper and Broadcom its acquisition of VMWare and the market took a pause to reconsider its options, unsure of HPE's and Broadcom's commitment to this space.

Meanwhile, traditional telecom vendors have caught up and Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung have announced different offering in the space. Nokia's strategy, in my mind wasn't very competitive, opting for near RT RIC rather than non RT RIC to start with. I have expanded my perspective on the market opportunity here. 

With the acquisition of Juniper Network's RAN intelligence team and technology, Nokia is reinforcing its product offering with a leading technology team. It will be interesting to see how much progress has been made since the HPE's acquisition and how much effort will be necessary to integrate the capabilities within the larger Nokia product portfolio.